2012 Chestnut Hill Concerts program book

Fauré: Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 13 By the beginning of the twentieth century, Gabriel Fauré had become one of France’s cultural icons. “A quarter of a century before other composers,” wrote one admirer in a 1922 magazine article, “[he] readily spoke a prophetic language with an ease, virtuosity and elegance which has not been surpassed.” But it took a while for his music to be recognized and accepted. The first performance of the early Violin Sonata No. 1 was a critical success: Camille Saint-Saens praised its “resourceful modulations, unusual sonorities, and use of the most unexpected rhythms,” and added that its charm “makes the mass of ordinary listeners accept the most extreme strokes of daring as if they were perfectly natural.” But Parisian publishers found it too audacious and refused to accept it. A Leipzig house, Breitkopf and Härtel, agreed to publish it, but only on the condition that, since it was an honor to be published by such a prestigious firm, Fauré cede all rights and agree to receive no money for the work.

Although Fauré’s music evolved over the years, his basic approach to composition didn’t change. Early on, he showed his propensity for breaking rules while composing within accepted Classical forms. As the biographer Charles Koechlin put it, “There was no modulation he would not use if it pleased him … [he took] excursions far from a tonality to which he returned how and when he pleased, with the perfect grace of a cat falling on its feet.” This continual interplay between working within rules and stretching them is evident in the first Violin Sonata. One of Fauré’s first masterpieces, it is written in the traditional four movements, three of them in sonata form. Within that form, though, he pushes traditional limits with unusual modulations, modal melodies, and rhythmic liberties.

Most noticeably, the sonata overflows with lovely melodies. Fauré won early acclaim as a composer of songs (critics called him “the French Schubert”), and his music is infused with lyrical lines. The opening movement, Allegro molto, is awash in melody, beginning with the piano’s long opening song. The violin introduces a second, falling theme, and both of these themes are developed in the central section, where Fauré, in a characteristic technique, modulates them in a series of upward steps that end with the second theme floating over hushed piano chords. As tonality becomes blurred, it is the continuous melodies that carry the movement forward to a stirring conclusion. In the sonorous Andante that follows, written in 9/8 time, the two instruments pass a lilting, barcarolle-like song back and forth, as the mood shifts from tenderness to passion and back, again through a series of modulations.

The third movement, Allegro vivo, is one of Fauré’s frothy French confections – a light-hearted scherzo that takes rhythmic and tonal liberties, with its outer sections surrounding a graceful Trio that suggests Schumann. The Sonata ends boldly, with an Allegro quasi presto finale that is dramatic, romantic, and vigorously rhythmic, and that lets the violin soar in a virtuosic coda. Written at a time when French composers were beginning to preach the need to regenerate French music, Fauré’s sonata showed how the German model could be made to sound distinctively French.

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